Few-nucleon systems with state-of-the-art chiral nucleon-nucleon forces

TL;DR

This paper uses advanced chiral nucleon-nucleon forces to analyze few-nucleon systems, revealing the necessity of three-nucleon forces and identifying optimal energy ranges for their study.

Contribution

It applies high-order chiral potentials with error analysis to nucleon-deuteron scattering, providing clear evidence for missing three-nucleon forces and assessing their expected sizes.

Findings

Higher-order calculations deviate from experimental data outside uncertainty bounds.

Three-nucleon force contributions align with Weinberg's power counting expectations.

Identifies energy ranges in Nd scattering ideal for studying three-nucleon forces.

Abstract

We apply improved nucleon-nucleon potentials up to fifth order in chiral effective field theory, along with a new analysis of the theoretical truncation errors, to study nucleon-deuteron (Nd) scattering and selected low-energy observables in 3H, 4He, and 6Li. Calculations beyond second order differ from experiment well outside the range of quantified uncertainties, providing truly unambiguous evidence for missing three-nucleon forces within the employed framework. The sizes of the required three-nucleon force contributions agree well with expectations based on Weinberg's power counting. We identify the energy range in elastic Nd scattering best suited to study three-nucleon force effects and estimate the achievable accuracy of theoretical predictions for various observables.